


whatever this love brought me

by faedemon



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: (but that's only kind of relevant), Angst, Coping Mechanisms, F/M, Gabriel Agreste is a bad father, Heartbreak, Moving On, Secret Identity, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unrequited Love, read at your own discretion!, this fic is purely unhappy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 15:46:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18995686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: “I’ve told you that I’m in love with another boy before,” she starts. “That was true. I’m probably still in love with him, if I’m being honest, but I don’t… really want to? I don’t want to love him anymore.”A what-if scenario from Chat Noir's perspective in which Marinette has loved Adrien too hard, for too long and decides to finally, finally let him go.





	whatever this love brought me

Adrien can feel, utterly, the moment in which the ledge he sits on becomes ocean.

He is Chat right now, and he is with Ladybug. They sit side by side on the edge of an apartment building, a stone’s throw from the Agreste manor. He tries not to think about his father. He tries not to think about how his and his Lady’s shoulders are so, so close to touching.

The mood is… melancholic. Out of the corner of his eye, Adrien can see that Ladybug’s eyes hold a weariness that she has not let show before in front of him. They are particularly vulnerable in this moment, the both of them. They are on patrol, the last before the weekend, and no akumas have shown their faces for a few days now. They probably have a few more before the next makes its bid for their miraculouses.

They have not yet spoken since they sat down, done with patrol for the evening. Seeing the look in his Lady’s eyes, Adrien chances to break the silence.

“Something bothering you?” he asks, and he braces himself to cringe at the way his voice cuts through the night. It doesn’t, though. His voice is softer than he thought it would be. The air is heavier than he thought it would be.

Ladybug looks over at him. She regards him for a moment, looking into his eyes, and he finds that he can’t quite look away. Normally, eye contact like this would make his heart race, especially considering the vulnerability Ladybug is showing. Now, though, he recognizes that she’s looking for something in him, and that his feelings have no place touching it.

“It’s not really bothering me,” she finally says, turning back to look over the horizon. There are still the touches of sunset lingering: a grayness to the edge of the sky, a dimness to the stars. “I’m just reflecting, I guess.”

“About what?”

She seems to turn this over in her head for a moment, perhaps wondering what to say. Perhaps if she should say it.

“I’ve told you that I’m in love with another boy before,” she starts, and Adrien immediately feels that familiar, harsh lap at his heart. A gurgling ocean wave, tide tugging at him, reeling him in. The salt stings.

He says nothing, waiting for her to go on, expression open and solemn. She glances at him quickly before continuing.

“That was true. I’m probably still in love with him, if I’m being honest, but—” and here she breaks for a moment. Her face twists a bit; her eyebrows crinkle in the middle and her mouth turns up in a grimace. “I don’t… really want to? I don’t want to love him anymore.” And here the tide, if slightly, recedes.

“You don’t want to?” Adrien prompts, eager for some clarification. _Please say we have a chance_ , his heart seems to beg, brine sloughing off its pumping mass like shed skin.

Ladybug nods, slow, as she speaks, as if she doesn’t realize she’s doing it. “Yeah. I’ve… I’ve loved him for a long time. Probably over a year at this point. And I’ve tried to tell him, but I always get—stuck? I guess?” She chews this over for a moment. “I never know what to say, and if I try to say something, it comes out all screwed up, and I just act like a mess around him. Even just being his friend is hard without tripping over my own tongue all the time!” She makes a sort of growly huff in the back of her throat that Adrien finds stupidly endearing. Hearing her talk about this is… not as hard as it could be.

“It’s just gotten exhausting lately. It’s really, really hard to keep loving him so much I think my heart’s going to give out when there’s genuinely no hope of him loving me back.”

“How do you know there’s no hope?” he asks, and distantly he curses his mouth, because if she decides to pursue this mystery kid further because of _his_ encouragement, he’s absolutely going to combust.

Ladybug chuckles a little, a hopeless and dry thing. “For one, I can never work up the nerve to tell him I’m in love with him. And secondly… there are a lot of other girls chasing him, and there’s one who I really think has a chance. She can talk to him, at least.” Then, abruptly, Ladybug turns to face him, and Adrien feels naked when she meets his eyes. “But also, even if he did tell me liked me back, I don’t think I’d believe him.”

Adrien wants to protest at this. He wants to implore her to understand her beauty, he wants to tell her _how could anyone not love you, how could you think someone would be lying about that_ —but something in her eyes right here, in this moment, stops him. She has never looked less confident than right now. She has never looked less… less like Ladybug. Less like a heroine, like an indomitable thing. Adrien feels, in this moment, like he got something wrong somewhere. Like he missed something important when he decided to love Ladybug, something that he should have known.

He realizes, right then, that maybe keeping their civilian identities secret wasn’t only for their safety.

Ladybug sighs, and turns away, and Adrien feels like an immense weight has been lifted from his shoulders. She kicks her legs a little where they dangle, and he watches the reflection of the moonlight on her suit curl around her calf. Even like this, cut so raw in front of him, he can’t help but find her enchanting.

“So, I made a decision.” Adrien looks back up at her face, and finds the meekness gone from her eyes. Rather, she looks determined. “I’m not going to go after him anymore. There’s another guy, one of my friend’s brothers, and he likes me—like _really_ likes me, it’s obvious, and he’s not shy about it. I couldn’t think he was lying if I tried. And he’s nice. Really nice! And he’s cute, and he likes me, and I thought… I thought I’d give it a shot.”

Cold water, stinging with salt, envelops him again. Adrien can almost feel his heartbeat slow as it goes numb from the out in. He is submerged.

Of course, he wouldn’t get a chance. Of course. She is unattainable, after all. His Lady.

Adrien looks away from her. She is suddenly blinding, sitting there in the gentle moonlight, her face aglow with newfound confidence and newfound purpose. She is Ladybug again, but a different Ladybug—she is not the saves-the-day heroine here, not infallible. She is utterly, beautifully human in a perfectly Ladybug fashion. Adrien’s heart, traitor that it is, lets itself be swept up in those icy waves. If he can see her like this, it’s fine to drown.

“But you still love the other guy,” he states. She nods.

“I still love him,” she concedes. “But… I _like_ the new one. And I think, with time, I could love him. I think I can stop loving the first. I have to, actually. I really… can’t go on anymore, like this.”

It should be an alarming statement. Adrien doesn’t think of it that way, though. It’s almost as though he’s in a courtroom, and Ladybug has outlined her case, her heart the plaintiff, and he is the jury and to the boy that ensnared her he wants to shout _guilty! guilty! guilty!_

There is an air of finality, now. Ladybug has said her piece. It’s all out of her mind, and he can feel that, the way the air eases up. There had been a tenseness to it that he hadn’t quite been conscious of, before. So he doesn’t know why he says it.

“Who is it?”

The words are blurted out. _This_ is where he gets to wince, where his voice cuts the night air. A drowning man shouting into an endless sky above an endless sea.

“You mean the one I’m in love with? Or the new one?”

“The… the first.”

She smiles then. It’s a soft, gentle thing. She’s silent for a moment, thinking.

“I guess it doesn’t matter if I tell you. Everybody in Paris knows his name, I’m sure.” Something slithering and awful grabs sudden hold of Adrien’s heart, and it pumps faster.

“Oh?” he manages, the substance of his voice gone.

“Yeah,” she says, and it’s so casual it’s almost disgusting. He wants her to spit it out, wants to shake her, because his body is ice and he thinks—he _knows_ what she’s going to say.

“His name’s Adrien Agreste.” The tendril, fleshy and tightening, yanks him down into the abyss. The water only gets colder, the light only dimmer, and drowning was nothing compared to this.

His face, Adrien knows, is perfectly blank. He’d perfected the art of concealing distress long ago, when his father would snap at him for pouting at galas and crying in the dressing rooms of his fashion walks. It had long been a mechanism to cope with unending work days and cold interactions with his father. Never, never had he thought—had he dreamed—that he’d use it with his Lady.

Yet here he is, blank, entirely automatically. He couldn’t have forced it if he tried.

Ladybug does not look at him again after she finishes. Maybe she doesn’t sense anything is amiss. Maybe she does, and she doesn’t look so that she doesn’t have to acknowledge it. Either way, Adrien just watches blankly as she takes a breath, stands, and pulls her yo-yo from her belt.

“I’m heading home, kitty. It’s late.” And she disappears into the night.

And the apartment building is no longer concrete beneath him, but roiling, frothing sea, and he and his heart are so waterlogged. He and his heart are drowned, completely.

And he is left with the knowledge that, all this time, he could have been hers.

 _That could have been me!_ his heart screams between breaths, between gulps of sickly-salty seawater. _That could have been me!_

He could have been hers all along.

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys! thanks for reading, if you have. i really appreciate you checking it out. miraculous ladybug is not my main fandom by any means, but this idea is the first in a long time that i've been able to actually get out on paper in a way that i'm proud of, so i hope you like it. leave me comments if you do (i really appreciate them).


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